Experts say current water supply, even when not in a drought, will not keep up with Texas's growth

AUSTIN — Desalination, the method of removing salt and impurities from seawater or groundwater, should play a critical role in meeting the future water needs of Texas, a legislative panel was told Monday.

“Desalination is a huge issue for Texas, and we need to do it,” Steve Lyons, meteorologist in charge at the Weather Forecast Office in San Angelo, told the members of the Joint Interim Committee to Study Water Desalination.

“Municipal water demands are expected to rise by more than 70 percent by the year 2060,” said Lyons, who is also an adjunct professor of tropical and marine weather at Texas A&M University.

“There is no way our current climate will support that kind of demand,” Lyons stressed. “Your average amount of rainfall is not going to work.”

However, one key question Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa asked went largely unanswered during the afternoon-long hearing: What will be the cost of desalinated water to ratepayers?

“We need to compare the cost of desal to the actual cost of water now,” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, told a panel of Texas Water Development Board officials testifying before the committee consisting of seven House members and five senators.

“How does that compare so that we have a better picture?” he asked.

Gregorio Flores III, vice president of public affairs at the San Antonio Water System, said in an interview after he testified that in the Alamo City, which is building a desalination plant, the estimated cost of desalinating 1,000 gallons of water is $3.49.

This is a cost that would be passed on to the ratepayers, said Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio.

Since the average Texas family consumes 6,500 gallons a month, this would mean an increase of $21.68 a month in a typical water bill.

That would certainly not be anything out of the ordinary, said Larson, a leading water expert in the Legislature. Moreover, it would be cheaper than transporting water, particularly from faraway areas.

“That costs a heck of a lot more than if they had brackish water in close proximity,” Larson said.

Hinojosa said in an interview knowing how much the cost of desalinating brackish water is is critical, particularly in the next few weeks when the joint committee holds public hearings through the state.

“The public doesn’t know or doesn’t care about how much water is in an acre-foot,” he said in reference to the most common measurement of groundwater and surface water. An acre-foot is 325,051 gallons, or an acre of land covered by water 1 foot deep.

“All they want to know is, ‘How much will my bill be?’ ” Hinojosa said. “Those are the questions we need answers for.”

In all, Larson and Hinojosa said, the public discussion of desalination got off to a good start.

Beginning in Corpus Christi next week, the panel will hold a series of public hearings throughout the state, including a possible stop in West Texas.

“I am very optimistic that this will be a viable option for us to meet our future water needs,” Hinojosa said. “We have seen that it has been successful in other countries like Israel, Brazil and the Middle East. … Sometimes it takes a drought like the one we are going through that pushes you to take action.”

Rep. Four Price, R-Amarillo, who was in Austin for another committee hearing, said he is glad the joint desalination panel is holding public hearings throughout the state.

“Our water needs are high and our demand for water will continue to increase,” said Price, joint author of an omnibus water bill the Legislature passed in last year’s session.

“We have to continue being aggressive in developing technologies that will meet those demands in the future,” Price said. “As a state, we have an obligation to make sure that we turn over every rock and explore every idea, and this technology is proven; it has worked not only in other areas of our country but all over the world.”

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For that matter, what water is San Antonio going to desalinate? If you're near the coast, there's plenty of water to desalinate. We are 500-600 miles away, uphill, from an endless supply of salt water.

Pump up brackish ground water? What does that do to the water table? How much is there?

Take truck loads of salt water pumped up by oil wells because apart from mineralized surface runoff (Alan Henry is rather heavy in minerals and needs to be mixed with less mineralized well water to be palatable) that's what we have a lot of around here.

Aren't we trying to get that salt water oil well by-product and brackish ground water used for fracking injection instead of their using potable water? If we take that salty water to desalinate for drinking water, then aren't we competing with fracking for salty water and encouraging the fracking industry to continue to get potable lake and well water to use for fracking? How does that help us?

And isn't there more to processing oil well salt water than simple desalination? Ever see that stuff? Stick your hands in it? Yuk.

For us, not being near sea water, perhaps we should concentrate on reclaiming our sewage instead of desalination. Lot simpler; sewer pipes run to a processing plant right now. Much of the infrastructure is in place now.

Teshaw and others fall for the line that the 'fracking industry' uses. They do not, I reiterate, they do not use brackish water for 'fracking'. It is impossible to utilize it, they put it back along with the toxic sludge that they produce in the process of fracking. The myth that they do not deplete the potable well water is just that a 'myth' that they've concocted. We will surely run out of potable water the way they are using it up. I agree nowhereland, the oil and gas committee is a joke. The joker (Zach Brady) will not even allow others on the committee to present the opposing view with research to back it up.

I am unaware of any line the fracking industry uses. I am merely thinking about issues raised by the above article. Like certain others on here, Gold Eagle, you are prone to labeling rather than thinking.

It is plain common sense that if we develop an industry that uses brackish water we are competing with other industries that might use brackish water.

How much water does fracking use in Texas? I've heard stories about lakes pumped dry, see the Texas Monthly issue on fracking about that and other issues. How much salt water is produced from oil wells?

I know that from my family's stripper well, mostly what it produced was salt water, that had to be trucked away and disposed of. One time I drove past a nervous truck driver on a back road who watched me watching him as his tank drained something into a little stream via a long hose. Only later did it occur to me that it might have been salt water or pollutants.

It's a question of supply and demand. What is our supply of brackish water that we could desalinate? How limited is that supply? What the cost of getting the raw material? What are the side effects -- on water table or land subsidence?

And how does that compete with alternatives? What is the cost of processing our sewage into drinking water? What is the potential water supply from that source? Obviously, reclaimed sewage cannot meet all our water needs; what percentage can it supply?

And about "desalination," is that ion exchange where we replace one salt with another, or deionization? Some of the minerals we have in our hard water are good for us, some not.

The epwu.org site was interesting . Seems that when you use reverse osmosis desalination, you end up with water with concentrated mineral content, and there is a problem with what you do with it. Build salt ponds and evaporate it and maybe sell the salts, or inject the concentrated salt water in wells. If you inject the extra-salty water underground, then you have to be very sure you are not contaminating an aquifer or usable ground water.

Why not sell the salty concentrate for fracking use? Well, I can see a difference in viscosity that might make it more expensive to use. Plus if salt water is used in fracking, who knows where it will end up -- might contaminate underground water. Which is an argument that the fracking industry needs drinkable water to inject in wells and not brackish water.

The epwu site included a target of 15% for reused water, i.e., recycled sewage.

That El Paso plant looks pretty darn expensive. When the above article quotes a cost of $3.49/thousand gallons for desalinated water, you can be sure that does not include the capitol investment in the plant and interest on bonds and perhaps not even the cost of disposing of the salty concentrate.

$3.49 per thousand gallons sounds like the marginal cost of producing desalinated water after the plant is up and going.